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- [00:03]
Dena Temple-Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click here. The mug shot of Tony Christopher Long looks like the picture of just about any 19 year old. A mop of dark hair, a Calvin Klein sweatshirt. He's the kind of kid you might pass in a grocery store parking lot without giving it a second thought. But federal prosecutors say when he was online, he went by a variety of names, including inactive, and they claim he's part of a network calling itself 764.
- [00:43]
Milo Comerford
Porterville man is behind bars after being.
- [00:45]
Dena Temple-Raston
Indicted by a federal grand jury on charges connected to his alleged involvement in an extremist group known to target teens and children. Cyberstalking, extortion, animal abuse. Crimes that seem unconnected until you realize they're all performed for an audience. Online radicalization experts have called it digital sadism, but that label misses something. Not just the emotional component behind this, but the economic one, too. Tony Long comes from Porterville, a working class town in California's Central Valley, where the biggest employer, a lumber mill, closed down decades ago. The median household income in Porterville is lower than the national average. It's the kind of place where you might start to feel forgotten. And experts say that kids who feel unseen, who feel like the world doesn't even register their existence, are finding a new, violent way to get noticed through online cruelty. It's a hunger I recognized from years covering ISIS at npr. Young men searching for purpose and a group that offered them the opportunity to put their mark on the world. ISIS promised meaning, a place in history, even Celestial Glory764 offers something far more fleeting but just as powerful in its own way. It's offering attention.
- [02:15]
Milo Comerford
This shift towards what's being termed as nihilistic violent extremism is a profound one, people driven by violence for its own sake.
- [02:22]
Dena Temple-Raston
A violence that's not about changing the world, just about proving you exist inside of it. From Recorded Future News and prx, I'm Dena Temple Rastin and this is Click Here, a podcast about the people making and breaking our digital world. Today we trace how online extremism lost its ideology and found something darker. A movement with no manifesto, just mayhem. Stay with us.
- [02:57]
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- [03:45]
Dena Temple-Raston
From Recorded Future News. This is Click here. Before there were the Digital Nihilists of 764, there was ISIS. They were masters of turning terror into performance, filming battles with GoPros and setting sermons to slow motion carnage.
- [04:07]
Allison Nixon
O you who believe, answer the call of Allah and his messenger when he calls you to what gives you life.
- [04:14]
Dena Temple-Raston
Their brutality was a brand. And for Abdullahi, a teenager in Minnesota I spoke to at the time, it was magnetic.
- [04:24]
Abdullahi
I went on YouTube and then I typed in Syria. And then right away I saw like, civil war and stuff like that. I'm like, this might be interesting. It became a hobby, you know, keeping up with what was going on there.
- [04:36]
Dena Temple-Raston
He was 17, and ISIS offered something more exciting than the Twin Cities ever did.
- [04:42]
Abdullahi
You know, young guys in training camps and stuff like that. So the action, I guess, the sense of adventure.
- [04:50]
Dena Temple-Raston
He remembers the videos coming one after another, each one bloodier than the one before. This is from an interview I did with him nearly a decade ago. So you guys watched ISIS videos, right? They're pretty violent, aren't they?
- [05:07]
Abdullahi
Gruesome. Yeah.
- [05:08]
Dena Temple-Raston
Yeah. So just tell me as a young guy, what is the attraction in those videos?
- [05:15]
Abdullahi
Okay, so in the spring 2014, when we were watching those videos, like, it started off with like, the atrocities that were going on there, right? Like innocent civilians in Syria getting killed. Then came the fighting videos.
- [05:31]
Dena Temple-Raston
For Abdullahi, the story wasn't religious. It was redemptive. He'd grown up feeling overlooked. He was Somali, American. But neither world fully claimed him. Online, ISIS seemed to offer an alternative and the promise of belonging.
- [05:47]
Abdullahi
If you get the message and it resonates with you and you sit back and lollygag, you know, you're not. You're not on the right path, you know.
- [05:55]
Dena Temple-Raston
More than 40 kids from Minnesota's Somali community tried to join ISIS and other extremist groups. Abdullahi was one of them. Today, the gathering places are different. It isn't social media with its algorithms quietly radicalizing someone through suggested videos. It's encrypted telegram channels, private discord servers, invitation only chat rooms, and the ideology that once animated followers to groups like isis. It's gone now. These new Groups have no ideology. They're driven simply by the need to be seen.
- [06:36]
Milo Comerford
We've seen, yeah, this particular sense of isolation, this sense of creating kind of new peer groups online and a sense of detachment from real shared spaces in the world.
- [06:47]
Dena Temple-Raston
This is Milo Comerford. He's the Senior Director of Policy and Research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the uk and he's been studying how extremists leverage the Internet and new.
- [06:59]
Milo Comerford
Tech, you know, sports teams, education settings. And that has had a huge trickle down effect on how people feel and how they identify and of how they feel connected to society, to culture, to politics. Nihilism thrives in a context where people feel politically abandoned. That's been the case for hundreds of years.
- [07:20]
Dena Temple-Raston
In other words, when faith, community and politics stop delivering meaning, the Internet steps in to fill the void. Extremism used to begin in real world movements that then migrated online. Now it begins online and then breaks into the real world.
- [07:38]
Milo Comerford
And over the past 10 years have really witnessed the wholesale shift of the extremism threats we face today. To really center this online component at.
- [07:45]
Dena Temple-Raston
The heart of them instead of the ideological component.
- [07:50]
Milo Comerford
I'd say it's more complicated than that. It's not really an either or. It's not ideology or online, but online is the ideology.
- [07:57]
Dena Temple-Raston
This new form of extremism feeds on metrics. How visible you are, the memes you share, the reactions you get, the shock you create. Those are your credentials and the digital community itself. And you're ranking it becomes the cause.
- [08:13]
Milo Comerford
There is a very close relationship between the online and the offline in how extremism operates today. Ten, 15 years ago, while you might have had a membership card to an extremist organization, now really it's about participating in an online world that is in many cases as real as the offline worlds that people were motivated by previously.
- [08:32]
Dena Temple-Raston
A few years ago, we saw a preview of that shift in something called violence as a service. Teenagers offering digital mayhem for hire. They didn't believe in anything except maybe a side hustle. Do you have like a, a plan, like when you won't do this anymore? Is there a certain amount of money you'll get to?
- [08:52]
Yuki
I think about nine figs.
- [08:55]
Dena Temple-Raston
This is a sim swapper who goes by the name Yuki. We spoke to him back in 2022.
- [09:00]
Advertisement Voice
Really?
- [09:01]
Dena Temple-Raston
And how close are you.
- [09:04]
Yuki
Really far? I mean, nine figs, that's $100 million. That's a few more years at least.
- [09:12]
Dena Temple-Raston
He was doing two things to make money. First, he was a sim swapper. He worked with Other teenagers to take over people's cell phones, change their passwords, and then drain their crypto accounts. Is it right to think of sim swappers as being younger people, or do I misunderstand that?
- [09:29]
Yuki
That is very. That is very accurate, by the way. A lot of sim swappers are actually like 13 to, like 18.
- [09:35]
Dena Temple-Raston
Yuki was a little older than most, and he and his sim swapping crew were part of what's known as the community or the comm. Think of it as a web of violent, overlapping subcultures. Hackers, swatters, data thieves, 764. The group we mentioned earlier is one branch. Yuki and his crew operated like a startup, complete with a telegram channel called Brick Squad, where you could literally buy acts of violence using crypto. The offerings included throwing a brick through a window, firebombings, even murder.
- [10:09]
Yuki
I say what you need done? He say, oh, I just need to throw a brick in his window.
- [10:14]
Milo Comerford
Shootings, firebombings.
- [10:16]
Yuki
I mean, the worst one we've probably.
- [10:17]
Milo Comerford
Done was kidnap someone.
- [10:20]
Yuki
Like, if I had to come to it, like killings. Which it has came to that. But I'll speak on that later.
- [10:26]
Dena Temple-Raston
Can you kind of explain to me why you guys like to do this?
- [10:30]
Yuki
It's the fun, I guess.
- [10:33]
Dena Temple-Raston
Just. Yeah, pretty much just the fun. So tell me why you're not worried.
- [10:37]
Abdullahi
Yeah, the punishment is not very big.
- [10:41]
Dena Temple-Raston
And I'm just not worried about it. The feds aren't on shit. Most of these kids were born after the 2008 financial crisis. They watched their parents lose homes and jobs and a sense of control online. They built a new economy where pain itself became currency. Those early hackers and swatters were chasing money and notoriety. But this next generation, they're harder to read. They do it for something more unpredictable, the fleeting proof that they still matter. That's when we come back. Stay with us.
- [11:27]
Robert Smith
You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name. Decided to call it business history.
- [11:49]
Advertisement Voice
You know why?
- [11:50]
Yuki
Why?
- [11:51]
Robert Smith
Because it's a show about the history of business available everywhere.
- [11:54]
Dena Temple-Raston
You get your broadcasts, Click here. By 2020, during the COVID pandemic, isolation was everywhere. Lockdowns, empty classrooms, screens as the only thing to keep kids company.
- [12:15]
Allison Nixon
All these kids doing online Class. And what that meant was all these kids getting on the Internet that previously had no interest in the Internet. And what this is, is prey.
- [12:27]
Dena Temple-Raston
This is Allison Nixon, the chief research officer at a CyberSecurity company called unit 221B. She's been tracking groups like Brick Squad for years. But during COVID she noticed a shift. The number of young people getting tangled up in these communities just exploded. And they were largely in places with no safety nets. Post industrial towns, rural counties, paycheck to paycheck, homes. Not the well resourced suburbs, the margins. They logged on looking for friends, but instead found themselves prey. They find someone who seems to befriend them and then they sort of follow them. Is that the idea?
- [13:08]
Allison Nixon
Yeah. You had a lot of young kids that don't know the rules of engagement on the Internet. They don't know what's dangerous, and they got a lot of time on their hands. And you also have an influx of kids that become predators, because kids, they could go either way in their life, right?
- [13:29]
Dena Temple-Raston
Predators look for the most vulnerable ones, like kids questioning their identity or craving acceptance. When they target trans groups, for example.
- [13:38]
Allison Nixon
They'Ll engage in something called love bombing, where you have a vulnerable person that might be feeling insecure in their lives. They're seeking affirmation. And so once they have the person ensnared, they will start to alternate between love bombing and abusive. And it is once again a systematic process. And they'll say stuff like, oh, yeah, if you love me, you're going to do this thing. And they would force these kids to do increasingly extreme things.
- [14:09]
Dena Temple-Raston
That's the kind of thing that Tony Long, the Porterville teen indicted back in October, is accused of. According to the indictment against him, he groomed a minor and forced other victims to produce sexually explicit material, which he later spread online. Allison says even though these kinds of bonds are toxic, they give the kids a sense that they matter to someone, almost like family.
- [14:32]
Allison Nixon
It's not an Internet addiction. It is a family bond between them and their fellow gang members. And any moment of privacy that they get is going to be spent getting back on the Internet.
- [14:45]
Dena Temple-Raston
Even arrest doesn't stop it. They log back in the moment they're out. So the programs that are effectively addressing this, they meet kids where they are online. In the uk, a government initiative called Prevent tried something simple. If you search for Booter or DDoS for hire, which are basically websites with tools kids thought were a harmless way to cheat at video games, you'd see a warning. This is illegal. Stop before you get caught.
- [15:16]
Allison Nixon
We're seizing the databases of these websites, so you can't do this privately. You're going to get caught if you do this.
- [15:21]
Dena Temple-Raston
Not a crackdown, a pop up ad, and it worked.
- [15:25]
Allison Nixon
And Prevent, with a very small budget, by the way, they spent very little on these ads. They made a measurable impact on global ddos. And that is in a peer reviewed academic paper. It is proven. And as a result of prevent's experiment there, other law enforcement agencies have decided, let's do that.
- [15:48]
Dena Temple-Raston
While the DDoS program was effective, Prevent itself has its critics. Civil liberties groups argue that in its early years, PREVENT cast too wide a net, effectively profiling Muslim students and communities in the name of counterterrorism. Educators worried it would turn teachers into informants. And yet even its critics agreed on one early intervention was key. When ISIS recruitment peaked a decade ago, the same program sent social workers, not police, to visit families. When a teenager's online activities raised red flags, they offered counseling and mentorship, even job training. The idea wasn't punishment, it was redirection. If a kid's search history included how to go to Syria, someone would show up at the door before the ticket was booked. The early intervention model helped keep hundreds of vulnerable to teens from ever making contact with extremist groups. And versions of that approach, what's sometimes called pre crime social work, are now being adapted to address online grooming and digital violence. Because what makes this new threat so difficult is that groups like 764 have blurred the line between the online world and reality. They've gamified violence.
- [17:11]
Milo Comerford
We see it quite literally.
- [17:13]
Dena Temple-Raston
Milo Comerford again, you know, you have.
- [17:15]
Milo Comerford
Scoreboards for different types of activities, you know, for targeting different communities, for, you know, for attacking a police officer versus attacking a mosque or a synagogue. I mean, so much of this is really about trying to gamify the whole kind of experience of carrying out these attacks where they almost look like they're something out of a video game. And as you see, hyper real graphics.
- [17:35]
Dena Temple-Raston
What starts as belonging becomes a kind of hunger games competition. The goal isn't ideology or money anymore, it's visibility winning, and it's faster. What once took months of indoctrination now happens in just weeks because there's nothing to learn. No theology, no politics, just leveling up. And that's why Milo says, we're seeing kids as young as 11 get pulled into all of this.
- [18:03]
Milo Comerford
These aren't ideologies. You're not going to be deprogramming someone. What you're dealing really with in These online communities is grooming of a different scale. People are being groomed towards carrying out acts of violence. But what you are going to be able to do is learn from some of the other sectors that have been dealing with this kind of challenge for a while. You know, the abuse sector, those dealing with violence against women and girls.
- [18:21]
Dena Temple-Raston
In the ISIS years, Prevent's goal was to change minds. Now the goal is to change trajectories.
- [18:28]
Milo Comerford
All the promising interventions are about getting information out to people. It's about knowing who to speak to and also providing pathways for referral that aren't just picking up the phone and getting someone arrested, but rather providing them with the support they need. So everything I've seen in this space is really pointing to bystanders. A lot of those interventions were geared towards ideological deprogramming. You were trying to change someone's mind. You were trying to get them to be convinced that violence wasn't the answer. Maybe they could channel their energies into more productive, democratic means of participation, et cetera. Often by the time they're at the cusp of carrying out an attack, it's far too late for intervention.
- [19:09]
Dena Temple-Raston
So the ARC looks a little like this. ISIS radicalized through belief, sim swappers through greed and 764 and groups like it through emptiness and the performance of it. When hurting people becomes a way to be seen, the answer isn't louder crackdowns or longer sentences. It's earlier than that in classrooms, living rooms, discord servers where someone, anyone, can interrupt the game before the points start accruing. Because the only thing more contagious than cruelty online is attention. This is. Click here.
- [19:52]
Advertisement Voice
If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.
- [20:22]
Dena Temple-Raston
Here are some of the top tech stories making news this week. It's Tuesday, November 18th. A scam center strike force is being created. Last week, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, announced the creation of a new Scam Center Strike Force. It's a kind of federal SWAT team for online fraud focused on Southeast Asia's booming cyber scam compounds. My office will not stand by as these Chinese Organized crimes enterprises empty out the bank accounts of hardworking Americans. These transnational crime rings typically operate out of the Philippines, Cambodia and Laos, and they're places where workers are often trafficked and then forced to run romance scams or investment schemes against unsuspecting victims. Over the last five years, U.S. officials say these groups have stolen billions of dollars from Americans. The new task force plans to combine sanctions with new criminal prosecutions to try to hobble these scam centers and maybe claw back what they can. So far, the Justice Department says it has seized over $400 million in crypto. Investigators hope to use that money to pay restitution to victims who in many cases lost their life savings to these scammers.
- [21:45]
Robert Smith
A court ruling today raises new concerns about the cameras that dozens of Washington police departments use to catch criminals.
- [21:51]
Dena Temple-Raston
A judge in Washington state ruled last week that footage from Flock Safety cameras, the license plate scanners popping up in towns all over America is public record that can be requested. The decision comes as Flock Safety is under fire for sharing data with immigration authorities and for its role in abortion related investigations. Two cities in Washington state temporarily shut off their camera networks during the legal battle, and they deleted footage while requests were pending. Some legal experts say that in itself may violate public records laws. Privacy advocates are calling the ruling a win, not just for its transparency implications, but also as a model for communities nationwide trying to understand just how much their police are watching. New York's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure act puts some guardrails on how businesses can use your personal data. Earlier this year, New York passed a law targeting personalized pricing, also known as surveillance pricing. Now comes the hard part trying to enforce it. Algorithmic pricing is when companies quietly charge different customers different prices based on what an algorithm thinks they're willing to pay. Airlines led the way on this, but now pharmacies, retailers, rideshare apps, and nearly every corner of the online shopping world have hopped on board. Under the new law, checkout pages in New York State must include disclosures like this.
- [23:22]
Advertisement Voice
This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.
- [23:26]
Dena Temple-Raston
New York's attorney general is encouraging consumers to report companies that don't comply. Violations carry a modest but symbolic thousand dollar fine. The new law is equal parts transparency and behavioral nudge, attempting to restore some power to consumers who have been algorithmically sorted without their knowledge. California has a similar law, but New York is the first state to actually enforce one. And finally, if you've ever wanted to create your own own Disney movie, now's your chance. Disney announced it may soon allow subscribers to create short form AI generated content using Disney's own characters and story worlds, and then they can share it on the platform. It's another sign of the industry's shift towards interactive viewing. Younger audiences tend to choose participation over polish, but not everyone's punching the air. Instead of a surge in engagement, Disney has been seeing a spike in cancellations. The platform has been stumbling through a string of controversies, from the decision to temporarily pause Jimmy Kim alive to public battles with art unions and various celebrities. Subscribers are saying they want real storytelling, not machine made mashups. That said, in the tug of war between artistic originality and algorithmic convenience, AI seems to be winning again.
- [25:06]
Erica Gaeda
Today's episode was written and produced by Dina Temple Raston, Megan Dietrich, Sean Powers, Zach Hirsch and me, Erica Gaeda. I was the lead producer for this episode. It was edited by Karen Duffin, Fact Checked by Darren Ancrum, and contains original music by Ben Levingston with some other music from Blue Dot sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley and our illustrator is Megan Gough. Jesse Niswonger and Jake Cook are sound designers and engineers. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Join us Friday for Click here's Mic Drop A listen to one of our favorite conversations of the week. We take a look at why these online extremist groups are attracting people as young as eight years old.
- [25:52]
Milo Comerford
There is such a low barrier to entry for people getting involved in these groups. It used to be with an ideology. You had to be able to at least express yourself. You had to at least be able to articulate you know, why you were doing things. That's not required with this.
- [26:04]
Erica Gaeda
That's Friday on Click Here. We'll see you then.
- [26:12]
Dena Temple-Raston
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- [27:31]
Advertisement Voice
Daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to TheRecord Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.